 |
The Editor's Desk |
|
November 7th, 2000
Hello everyone! As usual, before we get into this batch of rants and raves, it's time to dig into the WetCanvas! mail bag:
A fellow artist told me about your site and I'm in heaven, keep it up, what you guys are doing for artist is unbelievable! You have a loyal follower in me... kiandrajimenez Kiandra, thanks for the kind words. It's always good to hear from first-time visitors. I implore you to take a moment and join our growing community, and participate in our painting projects, collective self-education, and of course, the great banter of fellow artisans and creators. Wether you realize it or not, you're in the midst of thousands of folks who support you in all that you do. :-) I'm also personally inviting you to take a look at ArtistNation.com, our sister site, which provides free web space and gallery management services to visual artists. ArtistNation.com pioneered e-commerce technology for visual artists. Your free membership allows you to create your own web site, access your free web-based email account (yourname@artistnation.com), and manage your artwork. Once you've entered your works into ArtistNation's gallery manager tool, you can market it via our online gallery site, Art-Agent.com, for a mere 5% commission! Which brings me to the point of this installment of Wet Paint - a look at some powerful new features that we'll be rolling out soon in the next release of the ArtistNation commerce platform (version 2.5). |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Introduction
As some of you have noticed on the gallery manager page at ArtistNation.com, we've been arduously testing some new features which we hope you'll not only find useful, but profitable. We look forward to hearing your feedback once these go live. Auction Management We've integrated a complete array of auction management capabilities. Now, with the push of just a few buttons, you can automatically post items from your inventory to multiple auction venues, such as E-Bay, Yahoo!, and Amazon.com. The time savings here alone is tremendous, considering you could push an entire inventory of say, 100 items, out to multiple venues within 15 minutes. This would take forever the old way. A lot of you mask be asking whether or not selling on online auction venues such as E-Bay is "viable?" The answer, which may surprise some of you, is a resounding "yes!". E-Bay currently sports 15 million registered buyers. Not shabby. Especially when you consider that Forrester Research predicts that the online art market will shoot to nearly $20B a year by 2003. In addition, many artists are now beginning to use online venues as their primary source of income. Of course, at the end of the day, the ONLY trick to selling art is to get the right piece in front of the right buyer, at the right time. However, casting a wider net never hurts. Lets face it, if you've already put the time and effort into scanning your work in, categorizing it, and putting it into our gallery management system, why would you want to do all of that AGAIN, every time you wanted to run an auction on E-Bay or some other auction site? Silly isn't it? Well, now you don't have to. Each of your auctioned pieces will be presented professionally in each auction venue using our smARTviewer technology (as seen in the example image below). Now, visitors to sites like E-Bay can see your work in a consistent manner, along with relevant links to you and your portfolio. Brick-and-mortar galleries, distributors, and publishers pay attention - you can take advantage of this same technology to liquidate excess inventories, quickly, and easily. We'll also allow posting to multiple fixed-price venues soon (Art-Agent.com was the 1st - plenty more to come). Sample Image - Not Functional (or accurate!): Order Management / Fulfillment Tools We're building an impressive array of tools that will allow you to quickly fill auction orders, and manage them from initiation, through payment, to shipping and confirmation. You'll have the ability to communicate quickly and easily with your buyers, with tools such as our "auction sales ticket generator", which handles all the notifications and payment processes for you. ;-) Yep, that's right - no more futzing around with personal checks and money orders, and no more worrying about getting ripped off by a buyer. Just as with normal Art-Agent.com sales, we handle all the payment processing, including credit card authorization and escrow for you, so you can spend more time in the studio, and less time at your writing desk. Sample Image - Not Functional:
As if that weren't enough, you'll have the ability to accurately calculate shipping costs with our new integrated real-time shipping tools. You can now compare rates, in real-time, with major carriers such as UPS, FedEx, AirNet, DHL, Airborne Express, BAX Global, Emery Worldwide, and even the good ol' United States Postal Service. The shipping calculator will be made available standalone, as well as fully integrated within the overall Art-Agent.com framework - so you'll have just the cost for shipping those auction lots off. Soon, we'll be integrating this within normal Art-Agent.com sales, so your buyers can estimate the shipping costs quickly, and accurately, before they make a purchase. Finally, we've fully integrated package tracking capabilities into the system. So now, you and your buyers can track shipments in real-time. Just another way we're helping you to build customer loyalty with your patrons. Sample Image - Not Functional: Some final thoughts... Hopefully, these new features will meet with your approval. Be sure to drop your feedback in the site discussions forum once we roll these nifty goodies out to the masses. We have lots more to come - remember, we've only just begun our fight! :-) Until next time, keep your carpet covered with a .79 cent drop cloth, and happy brushstrokes!
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
